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Subject:Re: On-line vs. online From:Kelly Hoffman <kelly -at- NASHUA -dot- HP -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 26 Oct 1993 13:36:18 EDT
Bonni Graham <Bonni_Graham_at_Enfin-SD -at- RELAY -dot- PROTEON -dot- COM> writes:
> I seem to remember reading somewhere that hyphens slow down reading.
I'd be very interested in seeing some research on this either way. Does
anybody have any pointers? I would expect the readability to be rather
dependent on what's being hyphenated. For example, consider the phrases:
setup the menu and the setup menu
It seems to me that these phrases would be clearer (i.e., easier to
parse) if written as:
set up the menu and the set-up menu
I would guess that the hyphens-and-readability issue would also be
dependent on how familiar the phrase being mushed together is to the
reader. "Online" may not throw up any stumbling blocks, given that it's
becoming widely used. Other run-together phrases may actually be more
difficult to parse than the corresponding hyphenated versions. How
readable is the phrase "letterquality printer" when compared to
"letter-quality printer"? or how about "offtheshelf software"? :-)
I'll admit that I'm an old fart, so I generally use "on-line" and
"on line" rather than "online."* My new job's style guide tells me
to use the latter, though, so I guess I'm going to have to get used
to it. :-) This style guide also lists "off-track" and "on-demand"
(would "offtrack" and "ondemand" be easier to read?)
The important thing is to be consistent. For "on-line"/"online," I
would include using the corresponding "off-line"/"offline" and
"in-line"/"inline" as part of that consistency.
Now, does anybody want to swap hyphenated-adjective stories? One of
my favorites is "SUN BURST BABY CONTEST" from a sign at a shopping
mall. I won't tell you where the line breaks were. I also seem to
remember a story involving two newspapers that merged (in Cincinnati,
maybe? it has been awhile...). They decided to combine the names; it
resulted in something like "<mumble> News-Free Press." :-).
-- Kelly
*For those of you who prefer "online," do you make a distinction based
on how it's used? Would you write "the system goes online tomorrow"
or "the system goes on line tomorrow"?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kelly K. Hoffman kelly -at- nashua -dot- hp -dot- com
Learning Products Engineer
Hewlett-Packard, Network Test Division "Reading the manual is
One Tara Blvd., Nashua, NH 03062 admitting defeat."
